What is Google’s Open Usage Commons – and why? – Reseller News

Google recently launched the Open Usage Commons (OUC) foundation to offer open source projects support specific to trademark protection and management, usage guidelines, and conformance testing, according to the OUCs website. Seems sort of bland, right? Well, maybe.

Depending on who you are, you either hate OUC or you love it. On the hate side seem to be IBM and the Linux Foundationon the record, and others off. On the love side seems to be just Google, though a rising chorus of experienced open sourcerors like Shaun Connolly and Adam Jacobhave suggested that maybe, just maybe, this isnt the end of open source as we know it.

However, if your response to a foundation to shepherd trademarks is Huh?, its worth trying to unpack what just happened with OUC, and why it matters.

Confused turtles all the way down

At issue in all of this is governance, though OUC doesnt have anything to say about governance. Not directly, anyway. All OUC does is provide a place for open source projects to park their trademarks. Nor is OUC the first foundation to do so: the Linux Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, and others also provide this service.

The difference with OUC, however, is that trademark protection and management is all that it does. As OUC board member (and former Googler) Miles Ward put it:

If such benevolent experimentation seems a bit too convenient, well, theres no shortage of cynical or Oliver Stone-level conspiracy theories to explain it all. OUC, for example, is completely staffed by current or past Google employees, or academics who have received funding from Google. Its hardly a neutral organisation.

With this in mind, some suspect Google instituted OUC as a way to ensure that a Kubernetes never happened again. Yes, Kubernetes has been an incredible success for Google, but it has also been an incredible success for Googles competitors. Some believe that not enough of the financial rewards have gone to Google.

But if this is the suspicion, the OUC seems to go out of its way to allow others to profit from OUC projects. To wit, the OUC FAQ says:

Well, what about governance? OUC explicitly disavows any impact on governance or source code licensing. According to Googles open source chief Chris DiBona, OUC doesnt change anything [related to governance] for good or for bad. If your perception is that [Istio governance] needs to be fixed, then it still needs to be fixed.

Does this mean that Istio or Angular or Gerrit, the three projects used to seed the OUC, could later be contributed to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, or another foundation? It seems the answer is yes.

But doesnt Google control these projects, with a new neutral-sounding but still-controlling lock on trademarks? Well, maybe. But if we look at the Istio steering committee its the same 60/40 split as before (Google has six members while IBM/Red Hat has four).

What about Angular? Yes, its contributor crowd is mostly made up of Googlers, but not exclusively so. Gerrit? Half of its maintainers dont work for Google.

This needs to be kept in mind when reading open source legal expertAndy Updegroves comments to Steven Vaughan-Nichols: A project that is primarily important to a single vendor and primarily staffed and controlled by developers employed by that employer can continue to exercise effective control while avoiding the market suspicion that might arise if the vendor owned the mark.

Hes right, but theres also an existing governance structure in place for these projects that OUC doesnt eradicate.

Promises, promises

Strip away all of the bilious bickering associated with OUC and it feels like the heart of the matter is unfulfilled expectations.

As CNCF executive Chris Aniszczyk stresses, this is really about one company lying to their community partners and dragging their feet for a couple years. [Lets] focus on the loss of trust here... and why a new gerrymandered org was necessary vs. ASF [Apache Software Foundation], EF [Eclipse Foundation], SPI [Software in the Public Interest], etc. Lying is a strong accusation. What is Aniszczyk talking about?

For years vendors like IBM, a co-creator of Istio (one of the three projects Google contributed to OUC), worked on Istio under an implied (or actual) promise, as IBMs Jason McGee writes:

Whether OUC affects a projects governance (it shouldnt, at least as outlined in its charter), this allegedly broken promise is the issue. As much as I recognise this concern (and know, respect, and am friends with people on both sides of the issue), ultimately it may be too soon to predetermine OUCs impact.

Its quite possible, as John Mark Walker has noted, theres a large number of individuals with GitHub projects who have no desire to officially join a foundation, but who would benefit from low-touch trademark protection.

It could be, as Shaun Connolly points out, that OUC could be a real boon for individuals with open source projects, without denting the need for larger projects to get white glove treatment from a foundation like the Linux Foundation.

So, could OUC be good? Sure. Could it be a veiled attempt by Google to control the universe? I guess? But were really not at a point where we can draw a final conclusion.

It will be worthwhile to watch how the governance of the Istio, Angular, and Gerrit projects evolves in light of OUC, as well as take note of the market adoption of OUC by other projects. Stay tuned.

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What is Google's Open Usage Commons - and why? - Reseller News